Taking up Wal-Mart on their "we're open all night for the week leading up to Christmas" promise. Ugh. Oh. Boy. Dude. These are the only thoughts that can fully form in my brain, after a night like last night.
We thought we were being endlessly clever, seeing as last night and today are our only chances for Christmas shopping. We thought we were so clever until we pulled up to Wal-Mart at midnight to see that the store was packed with people. And when I realised how over-whelmingly tired I was, even though I rested all day and used my SAD lamp at strategic times to make me not as sleepy at night. And so the whole experience was like a bizarre waking dream of flourescent lights and messy piles of boxes (because they re-stock overnight) and hoards of Victoria's strangest people shuffling around slowly, inanely chatting and clutching to merchandise. No one was moving quickly. Everyone had the same mentality as us: if we stay a bit longer, maybe the store will die down and then we'll stand in line. Every employee we saw had this blank expression as if they were the walking dead. You could see in their eyes that their main thoughts were "Only a few more hours. Only a few more hours." The individual customers were far stranger than the ones that you normally see, such as the woman behind us in line who was way too energetic and pretty much changed all of her clothes in line, to wear the new clothes she was buying. And then she was collecting all the tags so that they could ring her through.
And now it's taking me forever to wake up. Even after I've sat under my lamp and have gotten a reasonable amount of sleep last night. Remind me not to do that again. Today will be different. Other than the quick run to the mall just for the bank and the book store, we're only going to small independent shops today.
